It took less time than ever to reach the state of meditation to perceive my soul directly. All I had to do was follow the pain.

The soul still followed the same basic structure as it should, with one glaring difference. The walls of gleaming divine energy that formed my first level, the foundation of everything I’d achieved since, were cracking. Splintering spiderweb cracks stretched all across its surface. Each of the painful spasms that wracked me was accompanied by the cracks inching their way longer and wider.

I focused, exerting will over what should have been sacrosanct. The barrier of divine energy shifted, shrinking as the cracks began to narrow. But it didn’t take long for the healing to stop. Like trying to shut a box with a too large corpse inside, pushing too hard risked breaking something irreparably.

Except that corpse was my soul. I writhed and vomited against the rough floorboards before I managed to shove away any awareness of my physical body. This was too important to waste attention, and I needed to fix this and get away as soon as possible.

I was able to keep the cracks at bay, but not close it off without risking even more catastrophic damage to the inside. I reached out to the spare soul energy that was already building up to a new level and seized it. I could put off my new level for longer if it meant sealing off this damage.

I began to fill the cracks, allowing the inside potion of my soul to expand as it seemed to be trying too while safely absorbing the excess pressure. I was gently loosening my mental grip as I did so, letting the walls slowly grow, when a bout of nausea hit me like a hammer. I seized my mind and soul, desperately striving to stop anything from moving while my control wavered.

I recovered to greater pain and slowly relaxed my death grip until my soul was stable again. Fucking hells, if it only hurt either way, then what was I supposed to do?

I let my first level expand, far slower than before and keeping an eye on my entire soul this time. The problem made itself obvious.

The expanding foundation threw off the whole balance of my soul, sending every subsequent level to wobbling and teetering on the edge of complete collapse. I might have lived most of my life without those levels, but I could already feel that letting it fall apart would have disastrous consequences. If it collapsed it could easily take the rest of my soul with it.

At the same time I couldn’t restrain my first level at its current size forever. The energies of the Hob transformation were already straining against my grip and if I didn’t find a way to release the pressure it could tear my soul apart all on its own.

Was this what the Hobs had meant? I had expected the transformative energies generated by the Hob evolution to flow out of my soul to effect my body, but if it was this active in my soul alone then there was every chance that Katturk was right. Every chance that the two forces warping my soul were incompatible and would inevitably rip it apart.

Nothing I’d learned from the Dungeon goblins had implied this, but they knew nothing of the soul system. They hadn’t had any contact with humans for thousands of years, so a change in the size of the soul wouldn’t matter to them. As far as they cared the soul half of the transformation was only to measure the more metaphysical aspects of determining your final form, plus maybe throwing in a few magic tricks if you got a form that had them. I’d counted on their ancient secrets to give me an edge against the transformation, if it was really useless then I might well be doomed…

No. No, I wouldn’t take what that asshole had said for granted, and no, I wasn’t going to lay down and die. I avoided crazy situations like this because they were an unecessary risk, not because I couldn’t overcome them. I had survived the impossibility of stealing the human soul system, I’d survive the impossibility of using it as well.

This was nothing more than an unexpected obstacle. I already understood more about the soul system than Katturk, I simply had one more secret to figure out.

I looked past the outer wall that contained the first level of my soul, the original level of myself. It was as easy as thought, for the secrets behind that wall were as much a part of me as the wall was. More in a way.

As always my original soul was magnitudes more complicated that the artificial extensions built atop it. It was the difference between the crude and simple machines Drakul had ordered built to haul cargo up from the floor compared to the perfectly engineered marvel of even the simplest animals.

Nonetheless, it was not beyond my understanding. My mother had taught me to identify the various organs and muscle groups of a human or goblin body, and my own experience had taught me the very beginnings of that knowledge in regards to my soul. I could recognize the continually firing pathways that must have been connected to some essential function, like breathing or thinking, and I could recognize the semi-dormant parts that lurked in the background. Every one was far beyond me in its complexity, but I didn’t need to understand how they worked, only what they were doing.

And that was easier than it seemed. All I had to do was compare my current soul to that of my memories, mentally noting the brief activation of an area that probably related to memory. There were parts of me that had never done anything before thrust into sudden overdrive now. It didn’t take more than a cursory check to confirm they were the source of my current problems.

They were releasing vast stores of energy, energy that was constructing entirely new structures in turn. It was fascinating to watch and impossible to describe. It sent a chill through my bones. I’d modified my own soul in a dozen little ways since gaining the ability, but now I was watching a god’s hand at work. Dead and gone for ages unremembered, but the blueprints of this very process had been still been design by those very gods that had wrought us in the first place.

It was humbling and chilling at the same time. While indisputably a master beyond what I could directly achieve myself that didn’t mean it was comfortable knowing that the ancient tyrants of my people had a hand in my very soul, sending out a thousand connections out to the glands and organs of my physical body which sent them back in turn. It formed an indecipherable tapestry that spelled out things just beyond the reach of my understanding.

I shook off those thoughts. Philosophizing later, surviving now. Masterfully designed or not, the ancient gods had clearly intended their changing soul to expand without constraint. Like a swollen brain pressing against the confines of the skull, I would pulverize myself. I needed to release the pressure, but all attempts to do that had risked destabilizing the rest of my soul.

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I had to cut off my Hob transformation at the source, undoing half of what I’d came here for in the first place.

But that had always been the less important half anyway.

I started working backwards, reversing the techniques that I’d used to help trigger the transformation in the first place. My fumbling attempts to claw back actions I’d barely understood in the first place shockingly failed to work.

I pulled back. This was clearly going to take longer than that. I needed to buy myself more time. I took the energy that I’d attempted to patch the cracks with and wrapped it around my soul like the bands of a barrel. It was enough to freeze the cracks in place, not fracturing further but still relieving some of the pressure.

I couldn’t tell if that would buy me minutes or hours, so I had to hurry. I started exploring the newly activated parts of my soul. They might not have anything as clear as an off switch, but by fumbling around I could gain an admittedly fuzzy idea of what parts did what.

The side effects were something else entirely. Poking around in your soul was not without its risks and I ran into my fair share of them as I searched for an off switch that might not even exist. The transformation mechanisms were already precision designed to warp the body, fucking with it further didn’t have beneficial effects.

I was probing as gently as I could, but even so I could feel my body writhing. I felt through my soul, picking out which parts exerted some control over my budding transformation and tweaking them as much as I dared. Slowly, bit by bit, I patched together a solution.

A stopgap. But we were all dying slowly anyway, so every life-saving measure was a stopgap when you really thought about it. I laughed into the puddle of vomit that had formed under me. I could still feel the transformation grinding at me, but it was stoppered up like a wagon with wedges under its wheels. I’d planted dozens, maybe hundreds of blocks and plugs throughout my soul, each holding back some part of the process. None of them meant much alone, but together they ground the process to a near halt.

I pushed myself to my knees then rose, trembling, to my feet. Every part of me ached and I had no way to tell what parts of the backlash would wear off and what parts were gonna give me cancer.

That was a problem for future me. Current me’s problem was getting the hell out of here. I climbed up a ladder over the loading area and into a rapidly narrowing tunnel. The entrance was covered in tool marks and even had carved supports for the beginnings of a scaffolding system, but that faded away after mere feet. The walls smoothed and handholds died out shortly after that, so I was back to shimmying up with one hand on either side.

It was less of a tunnel and more of a chimney at this point, because that’s exactly what it was. These things had been carved through the rock by stone shamans generations ago, and only in the last few years of his doomed reign had Drakul dared to carve them wider. With new thoroughfares carved through the mountains he would have been able to keep a firm grip on the traditional goblinhomes even after his conquest of the surface.

Including access to what few resources were unique to the depths, like dwarven craftsmanship. They didn’t deign to trade with goblins often, but even a single item from their forges would be enough to justify the expense.

It took me over two hours to reach the end of the chimney. Just long enough to make me question my sanity and wonder if I hadn’t died and gone to some strange hell. In other words, exactly the same as the last time I’d made the trip. I swore I’d never do this again, which was also the same as the last time I’d climbed it, but hopefully more true this time.

Unlike last time, it had been a far tighter fit. I hadn’t noticed from my previous position face down in vomit, but more of the transformation had bled through than I’d hoped. As soon as I popped out of the chimney and onto the mountain side I double checked my stopgaps.

The banding around my soul was standing firm without further cracking, and a deeper check confirmed that the transformation energies weren’t growing at a notable rate.

That wasn’t the same as not growing at all.

I opened my eyes and began picking my way down the mountain. “Damn it all to a thousand hells.”

The chimney ended a good bit above the tree line, where there was plenty of wind, so I had a while to go before I’d get any cover. Once I did I’d have a better chance to go over everything, but I wasn’t holding out much hope. The transformation was inviolable once it started. Nothing I’d learned from the dungeon goblins had changed that fact, and it looked like my own attempts hadn’t disproved it either.

I switched out my outermost layer for something grayer and scurried down as fast as I dared. Once I was among the trees I switched it back for my brown and green cloak and started picking out loose twigs and shrubbery to hang off it as I walked. Poking twigs through the tightly woven wool didn’t do anything to keep out the wind, but I could bear quite a bit of cold if it broke up my silhouette.

Walking was harder than I’d expected, one of my legs seemed to have grown more than the other, but that was no excuse to be sloppy. Once I was satisfied with my camouflage I turned at a right angle to the trail of broken vegetation for a good half mile before taking to the trees and folding myself into a hollow trunk.

I sank back into my soul with a knife in one hand as insurance.

My work hadn’t undone itself in my absence—although I suppose I was never really absent from my own soul—but the situation hadn’t got any better either. My stopgaps had slowed my transformation to a trickle without curing the underlying problem, which was exactly what they were supposed to do. Unfortunately it wasn’t what I needed it to do and I was in waters way over my head.

Plugging a damn was a simple task, no matter how complex the damn itself. It was only now that I took a longer, stress free look at it that I realized how distant that was from actually understanding the underlying design. Well, relatively stress free. The slow-motion look at my oncoming demise wasn’t doing my mental well-being any favors.

But as long as I lived I’d cling to life with both hands, scrabbling for purchase and screaming my lungs out. The complexity of the transformative mechanisms being what it was, there was a limit to how far I could go just by looking at it. If I wanted to survive what no goblin had survived before and meld the powers both human and goblin gods had granted to their peoples then I’d need to master both soul magic and biology like no one I’d ever heard of.

My mother’s teachings gave me a head start on biology, but I’d never known a goblin shaman with soul magic as a specialty. In fact the only people I knew to focus on soul magic were…

Humans.

Well fuck. It looked like I’d need to head to human country, and something with a lot more to offer than back water villages. I’d already seen the scraps that the clergy fed peasants, now I needed the secrets they kept to themselves. Hell, with how life liked to kick me I’d end up needing the shit that high priests kept from the laymen.

Either way there was only one place to find it.

I sighed and started climbing down. The only way out was through. Infiltrating a human city was far from unheard of, but that was in the way that climbing mountains or slaying knights in single combat wasn’t unheard of. People had done it, but that didn’t mean you fancied your odds when you had to do it.

There were plenty of human cities in the isthmus, but all major centers of knowledge had been looted and burnt in the fighting. Drakul hadn’t been shy in ordering the burnings, whether or not those on the frontlines had cared enough to be thorough was another matter. Whatever might have survived would have been stolen away to some shaman’s personal stash, and stars know how I’d find it, cause they sure as shit weren’t gonna be telling me. The other option was both more certain and more risky.

The intact human cities on the other side of the mountains wouldn’t have lost a single page, or a single one of the humans defending them.

In the end the question was simple. Did I want to hunt for scraps while dodging Hob recruitment gangs or steal from the dragon’s hoard itself.

Given that the dragon was the half blind half deaf humans, I was going with that.